


we played hide-and-seek in waterfalls when we were younger

by cyanica



Series: smithereens [post order 66 au verse] [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst, Blood, Catatonia, Cutting, Depression, Gen, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Hurt Anakin Skywalker, Hurt No Comfort, Manipulation, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Ahsoka Tano, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:06:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25222858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: The Jedi dissipate into smithereens, the galaxy falls all the same, our once-heroes try to build their lives back together from the broken pieces destroyed by the Empire, and they all watch as Anakin goes a bit insane nonetheless – only Ahsoka won’t leave him, not this time.Or post Order 66 where Anakin Skywalker falls in different ways, and Rex and Ahsoka bear witness to the end of all things, while trying to build it better. They are his wardens, or at least, they try to be.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker
Series: smithereens [post order 66 au verse] [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814155
Comments: 8
Kudos: 60





	we played hide-and-seek in waterfalls when we were younger

**Author's Note:**

> sequel to ‘until your godless name rots into my bone marrow’. this starts directly after that (it carries on from ahsoka’s pov), so i’d recommend reading that one first. 
> 
> if not, here’s a recap: palpy gave the order to execute 66, anakin couldn’t handle all the darkness and death in the force and accidentally broke rex’s wrist while kinda having a breakdown + a seizure, and ahsoka had just arrived to rescue them, after setting maul loose. fun times...
> 
> p.s obi-wan and padme are in this verse, but show up later because they were not on the mission to mandalore.
> 
> tw are in the tags. disclaimer: this is from ahsoka’s pov as she is watching her loved one lose himself to mental illness, and so that is why words like ‘insanity’ are used. im in no way saying that people with mental illness are insane, it’s just how ahsoka views this drastic change in anakin, while also dealing with her own issues.
> 
> title from 'obstacles' - syd matters.

They took refuge on Tatooine – an abandoned hut within the Dune Sea, and though they were better off than Anakin had once been while he lived here, Ahsoka had never felt more like a prisoner commended into this entrapment than she had now, despite not conforming to the traditional idea of a slave.

It was so ironic it was evil that the place that had birthed such vile hate and suffering for Anakin, had inevitably become his sanctuary, protected by his wardens – one who shared blood with the beings who had destroyed it all, and the other who had left him in what seemed like eons ago, but hurt like yesterday. The universe had a way with things, and tonight in the destruction of its galaxy, it damned Anakin Skywalker be condemned to the haven that had begun it all; the Force self-correcting itself back into alignment, the beginning meeting the end like a serpent eating its own tail, because history loved to repeat itself.

Or that’s what Ahsoka thought. Anakin would never say, verbally or otherwise. But she’d become good at making the fragments fit and piecing his story together – or at least she had been.

That had been before, of course. Before the Jedi had dissipated into smithereens, before the galaxy fell all the same, before Ahsoka and Rex had tried to build their lives back together from the broken pieces destroyed by the Empire while they awaited for Obi-Wan and Padmé, and before she had watched as Anakin went insane nonetheless.

He never came back, she realized. Anakin Skywalker had perished somewhere along on the Venator with the fallen Jedi who died amongst the ruins of Order 66, and the man who had awoken from that seizure, was just this hollow, catatonic facade that mimicked the life it had left behind.

Anakin didn’t talk to them, and sometimes Ahsoka would count grains of sand waiting for the others to arrive as if they were something of saviours.

Sometimes he got so lost in his own lost catatonia, that the man she’d once called her brother became an unrecognizable image of a ghost who haunted their home as if already dead, strangulated by a sick, nauseating need to atone for mistakes that were unforgivable. Instead, thick, almost watery blankets of rich guilt and fault smothered the Force and drowned Anakin’s presence whenever he awoke, breathed, and that kind of emotion wasn’t so easily stifled. She felt it so in her bones, the way she could feel her bone marrow.

_Blame._

_Your fault._

_Your fault your fault your fault there all gone your fault._

Sometimes Anakin would mumble ephemeral words into the unforgiving desert outside their hut. Things that Ahsoka nor Rex could ever truly be privy to, but she’d catch words like _penance, master,_ and _sorry,_ and watch the ritualistic prayer like an intruder, bearing witness to something too tainted, too intimate, too inhuman for her eyes.

Because, he talked to people – or maybe just a someone – who wasn’t really there, and that was terrifying.

But that didn’t mean she didn't talk to him. The silence was smothering, and so she had to fill the void somehow. She ran her voice hoarse, oxygen escaping her as Ahsoka talked about everything and anything because she needed to pretend like things were the same when they weren't. She needed to pretend like Anakin Skywalker wasn’t dead when he was.

“You have to come inside. You have to eat. It’s been days.”

“Anakin, please look at me. You’re scaring me.”

“ _Please._ I don’t know what else to do, Master.”

He stared at her with blank, devoid, inhuman eyes that don't truly see her, and Rex pulled her away from him, because she’s screaming.

He dreamt awful nightmares in the wake of twilight, just before the suns rose and shone scrutinising accountability onto their pitiful, broken bodies, but it was dark enough for the desert to still be freezingly cold. It left them isolated, untouched, neglected by the world entirely – as if making amends was forever unattainable, and the galaxy knew that.

Sometimes, Ahsoka caught the screaming whispers of Anakin’s fragmented dreams that seeped into the air like poison. He was dying – floating through the many gates of heaven as if he was someone who deserved rapture, only to be cast aside and taken by shadows. He was letting what was left broken and shattered and dead – the pieces of himself he couldn’t distinguish the vibrant colour of – to be abandoned on Tatooine with the rest of the apocalyptic insanity in the universe above. The solar flare of his burning soul seemed to smother his senses until they all blazed into one suffocating summer solstice of screaming colours, and everything looked so chaotically broken.

And then Anakin fell.

But he was not alone.

This figure in his dreams loomed in the shadows amongst the ruins of the galaxy like a warrior of death, like the one who had orchestrated armageddon and was relishing in it. A sickening, twisted smile of yellow, broken teeth slipped from his face as he bore witness to the debris of light – of sanity – Anakin Skywalker once possessed.

And when Anakin awoke screaming, the night had melted into day, and the shadow who never slept had golden orbs for eyes. They bore down onto them all in the form of Tatooine’s binary skies as if constantly watching, waiting.

Ahsoka could swear that it was the suns who spoke to him.

“ _Bleed.”_

The deranged syllable would wash out from the burning shadow’s mouth like the last threads of clarity aching to slip away into smithereens, and Ahsoka would watch as Anakin knelt in the sand and prayed to the voices.

There was an azure touch on her shoulder; a blazing cerulean graze down her arm; a cyan that erupted into her mouth with the familiarity of Rex. She could feel his intoxicating burst of supernatural moonlight dripping from inside her bones with every touch though the Force – and yet, they watched still and silently as night became day, as Anakin became someone else.

Somewhere above, the stars fell, and the shadow laughed, and Anakin obeyed its orders like a slave, like the beginning was the end, like the universe was correcting itself into alignment.

“How do we _fix_ this?” Ahsoka murmured gently, falling into a different kind of absence where her mouth tasted like ash and the colours of dying stars.

* * *

There was a blade stained with copper red guilt in the refresher, and Ahsoka didn’t remember finding it, but she remembered the look of Anakin’s face – remembered the fresh scars drawn like red lines on human flesh.

Anakin sighed like she didn't exist, closed his eyes hazily like he’d seen stars, and felt the euphoric ecstasy of a knife dancing across his veins. Ahsoka saw the crimson watercolour lifeforce bled into the sandstone, tainting them human red from the colour of his hands and stomach and blood and blame.

The discarded metal that should have ceased his existence was pulled harshly across to the warm body beside Ahsoka – Rex, existing like an anchor for them both. He looked crestfallen, but unsurprised at the sight he’d found them in, and that hurt something awful.

She pressed Anakin to her chest, cradling his head – and she was pretty sure she held him like that because she thought he wasn’t already dead, if only for a moment.

So they’d cleaned him up with gauze and tape, and mended as if it mattered.

One day, any day – it didn’t matter anymore – the electrical whirlwind transfused with ocean and sand like an armageddon of stormy natural disasters, as Anakin rocked against the sandstone of the refresher, with Ahsoka watching him like a lost child, desperate to undo the chaos and make it all okay again, but needing him nonetheless in the way she needed oxygen.

Again in ritualistic fashion, he’d stained the sand with atonement, with his flesh. And maybe they – Ahsoka and Rex – had seen too much, lived too long and were too far gone to have made a better effort in stopping him.

“Go away,” Anakin murmured, the first real thing he’s said to her. His voice cut through the atmosphere like some sort of twisted dagger that had the power to render anyone else frozen as if the seeping coldness of his frostbitten exterior would paralyze them.

Ahsoka watched, just as Rex did, as the afraid, battle-scarred boy became a shadow of who he was and wore an apathetic, cold masquerade that hid stars in the way darkness did. Perhaps it wasn’t even a mask anymore. He welcomed that darkness like an old friend, and Ahsoka was pushed back from their bond like insignificant stardust.

_I can’t help you,_ Ahsoka thought with lucidity as Anakin pushed her further from the familiar, comforting light and consequently left them both alone and drenched within an isolating darkness that they were never meant to fight against like this – detached, forsaken by one’s own making because a connection mattered not who broke it, only simply that both receiving ends had lost unification.

Anakin tore himself from the room, the storm followed, and Ahsoka did too, because of course she did.

The suns had gone down beyond the horizon and drenched the planet in pale, oxymoronic moonlight when Ahsoka felt it best to rebuild, pick up the broken, fragmented pieces of Anakin she found scattered throughout the floor – the universe – and built them better.

She picked them up like it was her purpose – she didn’t know if she had any other any more.

* * *

“Anakin?”

She carefully peered her head through the door of the refresher. Guilt and the painful dagger of hurt enveloped the air like an unsettled, quiet hurricane in the wake of a serene atmosphere. He felt more storm, more awaiting avalanche, than human, and she used to know how the chemical messages in Anakin’s mind seemed to fire, until the fire appeared in the sky and word ‘sixty-six’ changed everything. He was a sandstorm, unpredictable, unstable and she used to know how to fix the chaos, but that just wasn’t her anymore – it wasn’t them.

He stopped dead at the familiar voice from the archway, and Ahsoka felt the collective bond shared between them lose itself deeper, dividing Anakin and herself further and further away from each other like they were lost from one another in the depths of the tornado, one that was no longer a creation of Anakin’s own design, but instead one that he had simply gotten used to over the years, and it had transformed from alien to a part of who he was.

He was by the dusty mirror, upper body unclothed, and she saw the angry, fresh cuts that shone like an extension of himself, despite it killing him. They were different from his battle wounds: more purposeful, more cleaner – they made her feel sick. Next to the small closet lay his abandoned tunic, undershirt and armour pieces that were littered with white scuff marks like the constellated scars upon his skin.

He didn’t turn to look at her. She felt as if she shouldn’t be staring, that this was an intimate moment between Anakin and his thoughts and his body and the blade destined to end his existence if only given enough power of will.

The false sense of comfort she didn’t bother to lie to herself with had all but dissipated into smithereens. The expression on his face matched the unsteady, bound-to-erupt trepidation that drenched the air like smothering, bitter syrup. She felt claustrophobic, wrong inside her own skin like something had always been amiss, _abominable,_ and she realised in melancholic waves that the feelings were entirely Anakin’s, as if he’d been standing there for hours, picking off the parts of himself that were responsible – _guilty,_ and letting them reside within him until he found somewhere new to punish, until he broke himself apart. The ashes of who he was became lost upon the floor.

_Stop caring._

“I can’t.” She said aloud, truthfully, because at least one of them had to be. He didn’t seem to be very interested in her at all, instead taking to twirling the knife within his fingers again and again as if hypnotized, possessed. His movements were clinical, dissociative like he was completing the most mundane task he’d done one thousand times before.

Ahsoka wasn’t sure what had changed, what had shifted inside her to feel this acidic, burning anger in the wake of suffocating hurt, but the tectonic plates inside her heart collided like shattering glass that erupted into volcanic flames, and she decided that the two emotions were intertwined like lover’s fingers, woven together like the fabric of the universe that Sidious had destroyed. “Put it down.”

Anakin scoffed tiredly, exhaustion coating his features. He carefully inspected his scarred, calloused hands that had become blemished, bruised and bloodied over the course of the war like a reflection of his soul, and inspected the blade like a sacred artifact. He looked lost, far away, and perhaps he wasn't even all here as she'd thought – certainly not in the same reality in which his physical existence lived within. His mind lay trapped in what she could sense was a distant, abstract reality that left indentations upon his memories and the present like tangible scars upon his skin, a fault within his flesh that she'd only ever experienced from the second-hand cascading waves she had felt from his seastrom of a unifying Force-presence.

“He won’t let me.”

Ahsoka moved closer towards him, closer towards the eye of the storm, closer onwards the sun. Hot, starry frequencies sparked through their connected skin as her flesh met Anakin’s, and together they burned a familiar, vibrant ember of flame and light – a shadow of pure, addictive attachment that would perhaps be their undoing, if only they cared a little more. Maybe it already had been.

There, lying in the desaturated warmth of her hold of the Force, was Anakin’s burdened heart, who had all but consumed it with his inability to unlove, the shadows that haunting the ruins of the galaxy like a ghost, and his scars that made up the seams of his being like smithereens that had been broken fragments of his soul. Anakin burned, craved and demanded that connection like a blinding, radiant sun across the Force, and seeped fiery warmth throughout the air as if he were made of pure flame, slowly burning her.

They were destined to be like this, she decided. The universe had condemned them family and then strangers, bound together by their own fault lines, and they couldn’t deny it if they wanted to. They were tethered to each other in a string of red fate that resembled a noose, and instead of cutting the rope dead, they tied each other further to it and themselves like a line of life.

Maybe she needed to try harder.

And perhaps it was hypocritical, perhaps they were dancing around flames of magma when parading their bond of red ribbon around like a tethered lifeline, and perhaps they were destined to ruin each other with attachment the way the Jedi had always warned, but Ahsoka would fight for her master until the universe ceased to exist. If they fell, they fell together, and that was enough for her, even when it shouldn’t be.

Or maybe she needed to let him go.

Anakin hadn't moved. Haunted eyes bore down onto his form through the mirror’s reflection and he refused to look at anything else, feeling not only the trepidation of a sandstorm on his tongue from his own doing, but one made of heat and stars and meteorites from Ahsoka who burned like a nebula of vortexes beside him, against him. When he shifted his eyes ever so slightly to look at hers, they were glassy and red around the edges.

Her own eyes stung with something that seared anger – protectiveness. She wouldn’t cry – she refused to – but she wasn’t going to sit back and watch as Anakin Skywalker fell dead underneath his own design because he fell in the way people didn’t come back from.

“You’re hurting yourself.” She said simply, sadly and perhaps even with the edge of anger that corresponded with the hurt like some intoxicating, addictive sorcery.

She heard the mental communication of _this isn’t hurting, this is fixing_ run through their intangible, metaphysical bond like a waterfall of starry colours, but he caught himself from saying it aloud, as if unable to convince himself of the unsaid soliloquy. The words were whispered like lies and they both knew it, but denouncing them would be worse.

“Why are you doing this?” Ahsoka asked quietly instead, whispering everything she said with a breath of hot oxygen on the edge of her lips, as if words were too loud, too unfamiliar and ugly for a moment that was to be serene. They fooled themselves like that, she knew.

The attempt proved futile, as the sandstorm inside the atmosphere rose like undead winds, and the air was suddenly putrid with smothering retribution.

“I need to. It’s the only way I can stop _him.”_ Anakin spat, tone venomous and infecting the air like some sort of disease. The Force had become a whirlwind of emotions, memories and thoughts she’d never experienced, feelings that didn’t belong to her.

_A dark Lord of the Sith engulfed the air in a sadistic way and demanded penance for ruining plans, defying fate, depriving him of his most valued apprentice._

_He had escaped his destiny of entrapped slavery – but there was always another sort of prison the universe condemned one to. Anakin’s shackles wrapped themselves around him and embedded themselves into his wrists, his ankles, his blood, his bones. They sunk deep into his bone marrow until they infected the flesh and rotted it through with parasitic, agonizing domination._

_The Shadow’s freedom for Anakin Skywalker was a length of rope, and he destined the Chosen One to hang himself with it._

_“He has long been groomed for his role.”_

_And Anakin would pay the price for defying it._

The moment of comfort, of familiar intimacy had broken like a facade that one used to comfort themself in the wake of a krayt dragon, unable to deny it’s all-consuming, damned existence like the stars that haunted them in the void-like, blackened sky.

“Palpatine?”

Anakin huffed out a broken, cynical exhale, tearing his red-rimmed eyes from hers, the edges of them stringing, and the lump in his throat cutting of words that he wouldn’t say. She could feel the anger – the hurt – through the unifying, connective Force-bound between them, and it burned like fire alight from memories of a past not long enough ago and the foretellings soon to come – buried, repressed, but undead and slowly poisoning the already wartorn, explosion-ruptured, bleeding landscape what was Anakin Skywalker’s mind.

Her master fell back into that lost, unaware mindspace of the past where she couldn’t find him. Perhaps he never left, and that is why all she felt from him were shadows. “He’s in my dreams.” He told her, voice more mournful than bitter. “The _Shadow_ –“ Anakin chokes, unable to find the words, and the whisper of an aching longing for something more than himself caught the edges of Ahsoka’s mind like a repressed hurricane, threatening to break apart the one who tamed it – or at least the illusion of them. Anakin's glassy eyes wouldn’t meet hers, maybe they couldn’t.

Maybe this was all too much.

Maybe it was enough.

Anakin strode away from the mirror, and picked up the pieces of armor and clothing like trying to pick up the pieces of himself he left behind, as if it worked that way. Ahsoka knows, because she tried so many times.

“Blood is penance.” The words were said like a fact, something that solidified in the calming equilibrium of unsettled air like molten magma steams and lava waterfalls turned to obsidian stone, turned illusion to truth, and amongst the chaotic flow of clouding emotions, the ash settled. The sandstorm melted into the desert air like it had never existed, and the hurricane fell into nothingness. Everything felt dead. She didn’t know what to say to that, if the words in any language she knew of could suffice for the emotions she felt.

Anakin resumed his catatonic, devoid exterior, because that was easier, Ahsoka assumed. He shone his false colours of monochrome black and whites masqueraded over rainbow-hued, brilliant stars that burned like undead lava. The knife glided over his skin in penance that wasn’t his to atone, and the image stayed in her mind as something she’d never unsee. Like tainted bloody hands staining flesh, like magma burns that would never heal.

The last of her innocence fragmented into seams. It broke apart in crumbling ways every moment she lived in this new world, each time Anakin tore himself apart, and bled the way dying men did for the sake of peace she’d never seen, only to reveal a mute, desensitized, apathetic shell that juxtaposed the reason they had fought.

They were all damaged, lost innocent souls, carrying around broken masquerades of shadows of who they used to be in favour of who they were now, more than they realised. It was easier, and they were so, so tired.

So she walked out of the room, and it felt like giving up, letting go, leaving for the second time.

But maybe Ahsoka fell in the same way the Anakin did. She jumped off the edge and chose brokenness in the wake of sanity, of reality; perhaps it was destined that way.

Falling to the other side was hauntingly beautiful in a sad sort of way to know that she was plummeting from grace the further she drove further away from who she used to be, yet became freer with each moment closer towards the ground. It just so happened that ‘love’ and (more accurately) the absence of it was a falling action – a swan dive – and neither of them had the illusion of wings like they thought they did.

And so, she realised, there were things she just couldn’t fix.

But they could be broken together, and was that really so bad?

_But of course it was, Dear Child._

The desert howled in manic, chaotic hysteria over the horizon’s shadow, and she let the twisted, sickening laughter wash over her like the absence of warmth in the burning sand’s twin sky.

They had lost all the same, and The Shadow taunted them with his victory, screaming _freedom is a lie._


End file.
